Introduction
There are three soul forces in human beings: thinking, feeling and willing. These three forces are bound up with the physical organization. Certain thoughts and feelings will call up certain acts of will. The human organism must function correctly if the three soul forces are to act in harmony. If the connection between them has broken down due to illness, then there is no longer consistency between thinking, feeling and willing. If an organ connected with the will is impaired, the human being will be unable to translate his thoughts into impulses of will; he is weak as far as action is concerned. Although a person is well able to think, he cannot decide on action. Another disturbance may be that someone is unable to link thoughts and feelings correctly; this human cannot bring his feelings into harmony with the thoughts behind them. Basically that is the cause of insanity.
In the normally constituted human being of today, thinking, feeling and willing are in harmony. This is right at certain stages of evolution. However, it must be born in mind that as far as a person is concerned, this harmony is established unconsciously. If a person is to be initiated, if he or she is to become capable of higher perception, then thinking, feeling and willing must be severed from one another. The organs connected with feeling and will must undergo division. Consequently, even if it cannot be proved anatomically, the organism of an initiate is different from that of a non-initiate. Because the contact between thinking, feeling and willing is severed, the initiate can see someone suffering without his feelings being roused; he can stand aside and coldly observe. The reason is that nothing must occur in the initiate unconsciously. An individual is compassionate out of his own free will, not because of some external compulsion. He becomes separated into human beings of feeling, a person of will and a thinking person; above these three is the ruler, the newfound individual, bringing them into harmony from a higher consciousness. Here too a death process, a destructive process must intervene; should this occur without a higher consciousness being attained, insanity would set in. Insanity is in fact a condition in which the three soul members have separated without being ruled by a higher consciousness.
Source: Rudolf Steiner – GA 55 – Supersensible Knowledge – Lecture III – The Origin of Suffering – Berlin, 8th November 1906
From one perspective, the human being is an organism consisting of three realms, each containing three "principles" or bodies:[1]
- The physical realm, consisting of physical, etheric, and astral bodies;
- The soul realm, consisting of Sentient, Intellectual, and Spiritual soul bodies;
- The spirit realm, consisting of the three spirit bodies Spirit-Self, Life-Spirit, and Spirit-Man.
From another perspective (one of many), the human being is also four-fold in nature – consisting of physical, soul, spirit and I. There is an intricate relationship between the physical, soul, and spirit realms, not just in relationship with each other but also with the I. The I works in the three bodies of the physical realm (physical body, etheric body, and astral body), transforming them such that at a lower stage, the three soul bodies arise and at a higher stage, the three spirit bodies evolve.[2] So we can say that, interpenetrating both the soul realm and the spirit realm is the I.
The threefold form of soul, spirit, and I bring distinct and unique qualities to another threefold form: thinking, feeling, and willing. However, a sufficiently penetrating framework of understanding of these relationships must first be built before we progress to the relationship of soul, spirit and I with regards to thinking, willing and feeling.
The Three Physical Bodies
In the physical realm, man (and all creatures) has three bodies:[3]
- Physical
- Etheric
- Astral
The physical body, being the atoms, molecules, minerals, and so forth of the physical world, is death—it is the substances that all living beings revert to upon death and is guided by the forces of decay and disintegration.[4] During life, the etheric body is in constant battle with these forces of decay, maintaining the form and structure of the body.[5] We see the activity of the physical and etheric whenever we take a walk in the woods and notice the teeming living plants growing around us and the decomposing dead leaves, branches, and entire trees lying dead on the ground. We deeply experience the etheric body by observing the majestic uprightness of a living tree as well as in the tender glossy green shoots of newly formed leaves in the spring.[6]
The physical and etheric bodies are places of sleep—they do not exhibit consciousness, and indeed, even in the sleep of living, conscious, beings, the etheric body remains with the physical body during sleep. It is the astral body in which consciousness arises.[7] The astral body creates the ability to divide sleep from wakefulness, unconscious from conscious. It is the force that "wakes us" to do creative work upon the earth.[8] This is also reflected in that the astral body temporarily leaves the physical and etheric bodies when man (and animals) sleep, and returns upon waking. Sleeping is necessary and rejuvenating as the astral body renews the forces that were used up in the physical and etheric bodies.[9]
The Three Soul Bodies
Something else unique occurs with the astral body as well – it is conjoining with the first body of soul's triune, the Sentient Soul.[10] The astral body brings the external sense impressions to consciousness. The Sentient Soul imbues the sense impressions with permanence. Whereas the astral body gives us, as moments of present experiences, knowledge or awareness of an object, the Sentient Soul gives that knowledge permanence.[11]
Because of its connection with the astral body, we can associate the Feeling realm with the Sentient Soul. However, it is important to realize that Feeling is not isolated to itself – it is in relationship with the other two soul bodies (discussed next) and therefore always in relationship with Thinking and Willing as well.[12] We will come back to this later.
The Sentient Soul is also where we, as human beings, first encounter our experience of "I".[13] Without this ability to preserve past experiences, we would have not concept of past. This is also the dawning of memory–not the animalistic "memory" of pleasure and pain events which are astral experiences in the animal of longing or aversion, but rather true memory in which the I experiences itself in relation to world.[14] The difference, to put it succinctly, is that man can reflect on the experiences of the past (his memory) whereas animals cannot.
We also encounter an important concept with regards to the I and memory. Whereas the astral body creates a separation between sleeping (unconsciousness) and waking (consciousness), which all creatures cross between (usually daily), the I on the other hand creates a separation between memory and forgetting. Forgetting extinguishes past experiences, which is necessary in order to "meet new experiences openly and freely."[15] Who can claim to meet experiences "openly and freely" without the bias of our past experiences, our memories? Furthermore, forgetting is closely related to acts of true forgiveness in which, while the objective "movie camera record" of an experience is retained, the emotional experience is forgotten.[16] Here again we see how the astral body and I are inter-related in the Sentient Soul. A poignant example of this "forgetting" is something most of us have experienced: the death of a beloved pet. Often, we will not enter into a relationship with a new pet until the emotional memories of our bond and the death of our pet have been "forgotten." We still retain the objective memories of our experiences with our departed pet, and even of its death, but it is difficult to meet the experiences of a new pet "openly and freely" unless the emotional memories are for the most part forgotten–we may say "healed."
In cognizance, the I elevates itself further. Here we encounter the second soul body, the Intellectual Soul or Mind Soul. The Intellectual-Soul (or Mind-Soul)[17] is associated with thinking. When the I directs its activity to cognizing the sense impressions of the external world as received by the physical body, the I begins to free itself from these perceptions. Cognizing (from the Old French conoissance "acquaintance, recognition; knowledge, wisdom" (Modern French connaissance), from past participle of conoistre "to know," from Latin cognoscere "to get to know, recognize"),[18] is a liberating activity of the Intellectual Soul, beginning the transformation from sense reaction to sense-action through the act of knowing. One could say that we are only awake when we know something or are contemplating (thinking about) something.[19] Furthermore, thinking is something that streams from the past—we would not be able to think without our faculty of memory, our experiences, to guide us in our thinking. Even thinking of the future (for example, contemplating an action) is guided by our experiences from the past.[20]
With the Sentient Soul, memory, and particularly "forgetting", affects our ability to take on new concepts and ideas. Similarly, there is a correlate to thinking, that being judgment. Our thinking is not just occupied with the act of cognizing. We are almost always judging what we cognize. Here, our judgments are guided by our feelings, and, significantly, our ability to be convinced of the subjective correctness of our judgment is guided by feeling.[21] Our judgment may be in alignment with objective reality or our judgment may be orthogonal to objective reality. Development of a "right" feeling life is crucial therefore in guiding our thinking so that what we convince ourselves of subjectively matches well with objective reality. When our feeling life is wounded (here we see how the Sentient Soul and the I, through memory, comes into play), our judgments are often inaccurate. And necessarily, the development of a "right" feeling life requires the mastery of the I over the astral body's / Sentient Soul's desires – not so easily achieved.[22]
The Three Spirit Bodies
As with the astral body in the physical realm conjoining with the Sentient Soul, so the third member of the soul realm, the Spiritual Soul (or Consciousness Soul), is conjoined with Spirit-Self, the first member of the spirit realm.
The Spiritual Soul provides a fundamentally different quality of perception to the I. In the Sentient and Intellectual Soul, the I is experiencing external objects or is in contemplation of those external objects. With the Spiritual Soul, the true nature of the I, where the very word "I" uniquely expresses the relationship between self and other, is brought to bear. Here, the I becomes self-aware, it perceives itself.[23]
In will, thought is present (as is will present in thinking).[24] Also, the very nature of "willing" can be intensified through the feeling life, for example when an activity is done with enthusiasm and love.[25] One can contemplate the forces of feeling and thought that guide one towards "healthy" activity vs. destructive, or "unhealthy" activity, and how complex the situation becomes when feeling, thinking and judging (guided by feeling) then guide the human being into activity. So while this may be considered a representation of "I-less" willing:
what we actually strive towards is mastery of the I, and therefore the soul bodies, such that the "...the soul in its entirety becomes at length a revelation of the I."[26]
It is the self-reflective ability of the I to take control over the Sentient Soul's feeling realm and the Intellectual Soul's thinking realm such that what leads the will to activity can be viewed as "right feeling" and "right thinking." (Incidentally, I use these terms not as moral judgments of feeling, thinking and will, but rather as the ability to experience their correlates, Intuition, Inspiration, and Imagination, as streaming from the Spirit.)
Engaging the will also does not necessarily mean being active in movement or thought. The ability to sit still, or the practice of mindful meditation, is often intense will "activity."[27] Engaging the will in "stillness" is a recognized technique for dealing with stress and anxiety, and has considerable healing benefits on both the body and the psyche.[28] Will is a duality of sleep and wakefulness–we are both awake and asleep in the activity of will.[29] For example, while we cognize our goal and move toward it, perhaps as simple an activity as walking, we are also completely unaware (asleep) as to how we move our legs and maintain our balance and posture when we walk.
Our three spirit bodies (Spirit-Self, Life-Spirit, and Spirit-Man) are the least evolved. Whereas the development of Spirit-Self has only just begun, Life-Spirit is only germinal and Spirit-Man will only be developed in the distant future.[30] How are these spirit bodies evolved? This is a complex picture in which the I must work to gain mastery over the three soul bodies. Through this mastery of the sentient, intellectual, and spiritual soul, Spirit Self enters into the spiritual soul. This has the effect of transforming the astral body into Spirit Self. Spirit Self can then impress itself upon the etheric body, and through the influences of art, religion, and occult training, the I, in conjunction with Spirit Self can work upon the etheric body (temperament / traits of character.[31]), transforming it to Life-Spirit.[32] Finally, the etheric body, fully transformed into Life-Spirit, can impress itself upon the physical body and transform it into Spirit-Man.[33]
I and Soul and the I-Self Relationship
Having completed a portrait of the nine-fold nature of man, we can now begin to work deeper with the concepts of soul and I in relation to thinking, feeling, and will. The soul is not revealed "to the I" but is a revelation "of the I."[34] Soul and I cannot exist independent of each other, yet at the same time they are both dependent and independent. For example, we can say:
"I am distinct but not separate from my sensations.
I am distinct but not separate from my feelings.
I am distinct but not separate from the thoughts."[35]
In psychosynthesis, we see a similar relationship of dependence and independence between I and Self.[36] The I "flows from...Self"[37] which reminds us of Steiner's words, that in the Spiritual Soul (also called the Consciousness Soul), the "I first becomes revealed" and "seizes hold of its own being."[38] Assagioli's Self is not unconscious (nor "the unconscious") but is actually the source of consciousness – awareness –both of the external world and our internal "selves."[39]
The parallel between Assagioli's I and Self and Steiner's I and Soul affords us a foothold in deepening our understanding of the process of the spiritualization of physical, etheric and astral bodies that "every man is working [on], whether or no he be aware of it."[40] Mastery of the sentient, intellectual, and spiritual soul bodies is mastery of feeling, thinking, and will. These three soul bodies are not just isolated islands: as stated earlier, each contains aspects of the other two forming a constellation, in each soul body, of thinking, feeling, and will.
These three bodies, with their predominant characteristic (feeling, thinking or willing), are frequently informing the I with conflicting desires, thoughts, and impulses. If self-observed closely, the I can hear these conversations – for example, in an adversarial situation (an annoyed boss or partner, for example) the Sentient Soul may be reacting with a flight or fight reaction, the Spiritual Soul with an empathic or connecting impulse, and the Intellectual Soul with "what can I do or say or do that is right" thinking. While it may take some practice, we can literally experience these constellations: our feelings "with our heart", hear these thoughts "in our heads", and experience our muscle tension (or our gut, as the digestive processes are also linked with will) with the anticipation of activity.
Because what our three soul bodies are telling us is often in conflict, each constellation with its own agenda, the I, in all the noise, can detach itself from the soul experiences leaving the driver's seat empty, to be filled by one or more soul bodies. We all probably have experienced this, that we later describe as "having lost ourselves" or "I was not in control" (indeed, the I was not!) In these experiences of detachment or in more severe experiences, dissociation, we can glimpse the momentary annihilation of the I.[41]
In each of the soul bodies, the thinking-feeling-will constellation could be considered (to use Assagioli's term) a "unifying center", where our sense experiences of both external (the world) and internal (the "I") continually modulate the relationship between I and Soul, I and Self.[42] As part of the soul, these are "internal unifying centers" in the sense that our soul's responses to current events result from past experiences of the outer world.[43] With this model in mind, we can glimpse how each of the constellations, as an internal unifying center, adversely affects the I when one or more soul bodies experiences a "primal wound of nonbeing."[44]
The Disidentified I
When our soul bodies are working together, the I experiences Self (Soul) as a unified force of inner and outer sensing in true conversation with self and other.[45]
In the above diagram, the sentient soul has the feeling, expressed in words "I can help"—a "knowing" feeling. The intellectual soul expresses the thought "I want to help", and the spiritual soul is "willing to help." In conversation with another person, we experience a unity with the other person when our I empathically "listens" to both Self and the other person. An empathic relationship sees and respects the individuality of another person[46] or oneself (one's Self.)
One way that I have worked with Goethean Conversation (empathic listening) is to consciously invite the spiritual world into the conversation,[47] moving my-self from "the center" to the periphery. The immediate effect is that this engages me more as "observer", both of my Self and others:
In this experience, we glimpse a future where the development of Life-Spirit (the second spirit body) creates a unity of thinking, feeling and will. At the moment, the mastery of the etheric is influenced by religion and art.[48] To stretch the metaphor, when we experience the "art" in conversation (with Self or other), this has an actual influence on the etheric and works toward spiritualizing the etheric body, having the effect of creating unity in our thinking, feeling, and willing. The effect is enhanced by consciously imagining and inviting the spiritual world as the center of the conversation.
The I is uniquely capable of being distinct but not separate from the content of our feeling, thinking, and will.[49] As Steiner put it "The perception of the I in the spiritual soul has a fundamental different significance for man from the observation of what comes to him through the three bodily members and the other two members of the soul."[50] The ability to disidentify "from any and all possible contents of experience"[51] (to be distinct but not separate) is what allows the I to enter into relationship with the experiences of the soul.[52] Even the word "I" is necessary to express relationship.[53] Once we are in relationship, we have the opportunity not just for conversation, but for empathic conversation. The "art" that we bring to the conversation is a unifying influence on each of the soul body's constellation of thinking, feeling, and will.
The image of the Eye of Providence[54], especially as depicted on the US $1 bill, is an excellent image of this disidentifying (observing) ability of the I (and of course, the homonym with the word "eye"):
Or, to put this image in relationship with body, soul, spirit, and I:
This disidentification enables us to create a new internal unifying center of thinking, feeling and will within the I, that is informed by the constellations of thinking, feeling, and will in our soul bodies, but is not subverted by those constellations. In other words, the I transcends its soul experience, but this is only possible when we enter into an empathic conversation (listening) with Self. Ironically, when we achieve this, we actually become even more open to the experiences of Self, to the experiences of our soul bodies.[55]
Conversely, becoming identified with a feeling, thought, or will impulse is like putting on blinders where the I experiences only the content of that soul body's constellation.[56] This almost always results in empathic failure in our I-Self relationship or I-other relationship — in other words, we either create anew or perpetuate an existing wound, within ourselves and/or within the other. When we experience this wounding, whether as a child or as an adult, our soul body begins to create a defensive sheath to protect itself. As a result, instead of an experience of our true self, we begin to project a false self.[57] Our soul body (one or more) and its thinking, feeling and will constellation endeavors to protect itself from the experience of empathic failure, and our I, if unaware of this wounding, responds through identification rather than disidentification to the soul's defensive sheath. As these identifications build up, we enter into what Assagioli termed "the primary infirmity of man"—the unconscious shifting of identifications that prevent the I from express its true self.[58]
Taken to an extreme, these constellations of thinking, feeling and willing within each soul body can become autonomous sub-personalities of the human being. We probably have experiences where we can, on reflection, say "I was not myself" or "that was someone else that had control." We can have many other selves inside us, manifesting depending on what soul constellation is being activated by the situation.[59]
In Conclusion
The challenge then is two-fold. The skill of disidentification must be developed through various practices. Our wounds, which adversely affect the health of our soul bodies, must be brought to light and through various healing processes, the neural pathways of our identification must be replaced with new pathways that remind us and promote the practice of disidentification. How one goes about this is not only far beyond the scope of this essay, but there probably is no prescribed way of doing this—it is most likely an individual path and therefore the challenge for the counselor, the life coach, the friend, is to walk that unique path together with the person requesting help. For some, the pictures and concepts presented in this essay will be helpful in either holding an image of the human being in its 9-foldness or by even bringing these ideas to the awareness of the other person. At the end of the day though, these are merely tools, and not every nail requires a hammer.
Exercises
Think of a time when you "lost control" from a negative experience. Write or draw what you were experiencing in your three soul bodies. Was your I present? Write or draw about your "I" experience as it and how the I experienced itself afterwards.
Think of a time when you "lost control" because of a positive experience. This may be harder, but it we also lose our I as result of excessive sympathy responses – as an example, think of how people react on game shows when they win a huge jackpot. Write or draw about your "I" experience as it and how the I experienced itself afterwards.
Think of a time when you connected with another person. What was your experience of Self? What was your experience of the other? Write down or draw the experience of connecting, and how much of the connecting experience was the result of listening and the resonance of Self with other. What happened when that resonance decreased, or turned dissonant? How did you recapture the resonance?
If you could rewrite history, what event in your past would you most want to change? Write the event as you would have liked to have experienced it. Is this an event which results in "identification responses"? What might you do to become aware of when this identification is triggered, so that your response is one of disidentification and empathy to Self?